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By Lisa Kirschner
The CMS industry has been up in arms since Janus Boye published a short list of CMS vendors that buyers should always consider yesterday.
The lucky few who made the cut run the gamut from enterprise-level to open-source tools: Day, Drupal, Ektron, EPiServer, Fatwire, Plone, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Typo3 and Umbraco.
All of these CMSes were bestowed with this honor because they met J. Boye’s three “must-have” requirements: 1) a focus on content management, 2) a global footprint and 3) a unique offering.
In his post, J. Boye readily admits that the list will likely be quite different in 2010 and explains why a few obvious players (Microsoft, Sharepoint, Oracle, IBM, Autonomy) didn’t make the cut. Also noticeably absent from his list were many mid-level players–although that’s likely due to the “global footprint” requirement.
While the J. Boye web site will likely be getting a ton of traffic from this post, some industry analysts are criticizing that the folks at J. Boye have undercut their position as a vendor-neutral consultancy by making recommendations for specific tools.
We at Flair tend to agree…it’s a bit difficult to to make generalizations about what tools (out of thousands of CMSes on the market these days) should be considered by a CMS buyer, without even hinting at the assumed functionality offered by the tools or determining that buyer’s business needs–particularly when there’s such a large price range. A better approach for most CMS buyers is to create a list of your top 10 requirements, define a general budget and narrow down the list of choices from there.
Let us know your thoughts on the J. Boye list–or who would be on your shortlist of CMSes. Be sure to include information about whether your list is geared towards a particular industry, type of site or company size (i.e. enterprise, SMB, startup).
Lisa Kirschner
Founder and Managing Director, Flair Interactive Services Inc.
Managing Editor, Content 911 Blog
